An incredibly successful two-year-old food business run by a pair of 25-year-olds with a passion for design and tasty seafood, Fishbowl prides itself on efficiency, cleanliness and style. But its latest push to become still cooler and less wasteful could prove divisive: the stores are currently in the process of becoming completely cashless.

Starting with one 28-metre-square store in Bondi in 2016, Fish Bowl has since grown to seven locations across Sydney, with a forecasted turnover of $15 million for 2018. There are three more locations planned for the next year.

Nic Pestalozzi and Nathan Dalah, founders of Fishbowl.

Photo: Supplied

The idea for Fishbowl came to its founders Nathan Dalah and Nic Pestalozzi after a trip to the US, where a new wave of restaurants serving poke (Hawaiian raw fish salad) was emerging. Taking advantage of Australia's access to high quality fish and produce, the menu is designed to be prepared and served quick while still being clean and healthy.

"We hit a niche at the right time which saw us go into a really pumping summer," Dalah tells Fairfax Media, "and from there we found a second site in Darlinghurst. We kind of just funded the second site with the first, funded the third with the first two and so on."

Each location has been designed in conjunction with local architects in order to make the spaces, like the food, thoughtfully designed and fashionably minimal. This is part of the reason why the duo opted not to go with "the big bulky computer heads" of a traditional point of sale system.

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"I didn't come from a retail background so I wasn't across any POS systems," Dalah says. "If I saw behind the counter of a shop, to me it just looked like mumble jumble. All the colours, all the buttons, the out of date fonts."

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From the start, Fishbowl has instead used Square. The company, founded by Jack Dorsey who is also head of Twitter, makes streamlined payment products that connect to phones or tablets, and specialised software to manage the sales.

"It was just a matter of downloading the app and we could make transactions. Before we'd even opened I'd already added in the products, the prices … I figured out how to use it pretty quickly."

Fishbowl stores use the Square Stand, an iPad-holder attached to a card reader that, once set up, resembles a small, white Apple computer. The stand itself is a $300 investment, and Square takes a 1.9 per cent charge on each payment, a charge Dalah says is worth it for the ease of use and cool factor.

The system also has the benefit of allowing sales across all locations to be tracked from an app, but there was one aspect of operation that Dalah and Pestalozzi still felt was dragging when it came to efficiency: cash payments.

"Each store, as we grow more and more, we look to systemise and streamline everything we're doing," Pestalozzi says.

"So having 60 to 80 staff members now — and it grows each week — we don't really want to have everyone handling cash.

"[Going cashless] means we don't have to rely on staff to physically count cash, make mistakes, take it to the bank," Dalah adds.

"The risk between taking it from the store to the bank and back, giving the right change, making sure the right float is there. Having to rely on a constant turnover of staff to remember to get enough change for Saturday and Sunday on Friday from the bank, it just makes operating easier."

Of course cashless payments also tend to be processed much faster and, given most Fishbowl customers pay on card, Dalah doesn't expect much pushback.

"We already knew we wouldn't be deterring the vast majority of customers. And of those that paid in cash, we figured a majority of them had a card."

While traditional logic might say that leaning into cash payments was desirable in the hospitality business, because you can cut down on bank and transaction fees, Dalah and Pestalozzi say that having all their transactions put straight through to the bank makes for a better customer experience, easier management and is also a display of confidence that benefits their brand.

For every customer put out by the need to pay with card or phone, Dalah thinks there will be many more who "enjoy the fact that the transactions happen faster, the service is cleaner. It's a more seamless experience."